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LIVE: Crown Princess Transatlantic Cruise, 9/22/19 - 10/8/19


geoherb
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13 hours ago, geoherb said:

Lunch in the dining room was very good. I had the London broil, cooked rare as ordered. I also had a great appetizer size portion of pasta with garlic and a tiny lemon meringue tart. (It was the perfect size after a heavy meal.) I took an afternoon nap before playing trivia. I joined my Canadians again and another couple. We were breezing through the answers until we came across a couple of hard questions. We missed three of the last six questions, giving us 17 out of 20 points. The winners had 19.5. And the professionals were half a point behind with 19. The Effy people had given some goodie bags for prizes in addition to the Princess notebooks the host had. I don't think they held anything valuable.

We really should have got together to make up a good team early on, we have 3 total deadbeats on our team and one of them often  has a negative effect  on our score, we got 17 as well on that one, didn't get the Steve Rodgers or the A Line designer or one other I forget.

We are poor on entertainment and sport.

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1 hour ago, 2BACRUISER said:

Looking at doing the baltic on crown 2020 season.  Are people dressing up real spiffy for formal nites? The menus sure look good. Really loving your commentary. 👍😍

 

Some people are. If you want to do so, you won't feel out of place. But if you choose to go a little more casual as I have done, you won't feel out of place either. For some reason, I noticed more people dressed up for the second formal night than the first. We have our third one tonight.

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44 minutes ago, Griller said:

We really should have got together to make up a good team early on, we have 3 total deadbeats on our team and one of them often  has a negative effect  on our score, we got 17 as well on that one, didn't get the Steve Rodgers or the A Line designer or one other I forget.

We are poor on entertainment and sport.

 

Unfortunately, entertainment and sport are two of my weaker categories as well. One of my Canadian teammates got Steve Rodgers, but we missed the A-line designer. I thought of Dior, but wasn't sure enough to fight for my answer (because I also thought of Oleg Cassini). 

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Last night's dinner was mixed. We both love the goat cheese souffle. The appetizer size portion of the gnocchi were just OK. My scallops were tasty, but they would have been better on their own, without the apple chutney and pea puree. The green bean and potato hash was very light on the green beans. I found just one quarter-inch long piece. One of my tablemates had two and another had three. DH enjoyed the tenderloin tips and mushroom cobbler. He had the cheesecake for dessert, and I had a scoop of the amaretto ice cream.
 

Our head waiter said we'll have escargots, lobster tails, and beef Wellington tonight for our third formal night. 

 

 

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Here are the activity pages for today's Patter. DH will go to the interdenominational service. He has not gone to the daily Bible studies. I'll go to the morning and afternoon trivias. I don't see anything else in the schedule that's enticing to me. 

 

If anyone has any requests of places on the ship to take photos of, let me know. I have not taken many photos of the ship on this cruise since we have sailed on it before.

 

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I walked around the Promenade Deck after breakfast. I'm glad I did. It's closed now due to rough seas. I made it to the first part of the chocolate demonstration. They were having technical difficulties. I had to leave before they got around to passing out samples of truffles. I played the morning trivia with the Canadian man, another man, and a young couple (or at least young for this ship--in their 40s). We had 30 out of a possible 38 points. The winners had 35. We should have had 2 more points since a couple of questions were poorly worded. For instance, he asked a question about how many teeth people have. He said that the milk teeth (baby teeth) are replaced by ____ teeth and then four more molars called _____ teeth grow in much later. He wanted 32 and wisdom, but that would add up to too many teeth. Another question was about the _____ glands in the mouth produce ____ to help digest food. We put salivary and saliva. He wanted enzymes instead of saliva.  

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The professionals won again at trivia this afternoon. We missed three. We could have had two more points, giving us 21 out of 22, but that still won't beat the people who have been on the ship for over a month. I played with the Canadian couple again. The second place team missed just one question. At least the questions and answers on this quiz were not ambiguous as they've been on some.

 

The televisions have two channels showing NFL games this afternoon. DH is watching the Vikings beat the Giants. We don't care about the outcome. 

 

 

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4 hours ago, geoherb said:

Here's a photo from the chocolate demo plus one of the Princess Pop Choir. We ate a quick lunch in the dining room so we could make it to their performance. They were great. 

 Aww, thanks. I was in the pop choir today, and glad to hear we sounded okay. We had a lot of fun in rehearsals, lots of nice people in our group.

-Sue-

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I went swimming for the first time late this afternoon. I was the only one in the pool. There were a couple of couples in the hot tubs. It was like a wave pool due to the rocking of the ship. I loved it. They had put nets over the pools a few times previously when it got too rough but not today.

 

Here are a few photos from Adagio, tonight's menus, and my escargot and chocolate journey. Everything was delicious tonight. Our assistant waiter took the meat out of the lobster tails for us, and our waiter offered to get us more. One woman at our table made hers a surf and turf by ordering a lobster tail to go with her beef Wellington. 

 

Magic to Do was the fourth and last production show. We both enjoyed it. We had never seen it before. My ranking of the shows, from favorite to least favorite, would be Encore, Magic to Do, Sweet Soul Music, and Blame It on the Boogie. 

 

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Yes, it has been a great cruise. I have very few real complaints. The slow internet is my biggest complaint. I miss reading the newspaper. But at least the internet manager was very amenable and quick to giving us credit against what we paid for it. Another complaint I have is about the water temperature in our shower. It's not steady. It goes from an agreeable temperature to too hot and then cool. Almost all of the crew members have been great. I did have a snarky interaction yesterday morning at the International Café when the server told me the reason they were out of ginger tea bags was that people were getting them to go. They're back in stock now. I think someone was just too busy to restock. I've had a couple of less than stellar dishes in the dining room, but overall the food has been excellent. We love our waiters and cabin steward. The latter is one of the best ones we've ever had.

 

I took a few more photos of around the ship this morning. Here's the display of gluten-free pastries available this morning in the International Café. They have different ones each morning.

 

 

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Here are the other pastries this morning at the International Café. I was good and did not get any. If there's a Breton available tomorrow, though, I will have to have one. Here are a couple of photos of Crooners early in the morning. It has been a popular place for people to have drinks in the afternoon and to enjoy the entertainers in the evenings. And here are photos in the library. There's a good selection of games and a few jigsaw puzzles. People earlier in the cruise were working on several of the puzzles on the large table in the library. The selection of books in the library is disappointing. There are a lot of empty shelves. I'll leave behind the one I read by Jose Saramago on the book exchange shelf.

 

 

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8 hours ago, geoherb said:

 

 

Here are a few photos from Adagio, tonight's menus, and my escargot and chocolate journey. Everything was delicious tonight. Our assistant waiter took the meat out of the lobster tails for us, and our waiter offered to get us more. One woman at our table made hers a surf and turf by ordering a lobster tail to go with her beef Wellington. 

 

 

Do you know if they were serving the lobster and/or beef Wellington in the Horizon court as well as the DR? 

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3 minutes ago, MissP22 said:

Do you know if they were serving the lobster and/or beef Wellington in the Horizon court as well as the DR? 

 

I did not see either of them last night. I heard they had lobster tails there on our second formal night. I had a few of the barbecued jumbo shrimp last night in Horizon Court before heading to Adagio for drinks.

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Apparently there was a storm last night. Some items fell from the shop shelves. There were other items that fell on the other side. I took the photo before the sales people opened the shops. 

 

Here are the activity pages from today's Patter. DH will go to the culinary show and galley tour. I'll play trivia. I may go down for the bean bag toss as well. I went to the gym for the last time and worked out on the recumbent bike and leg press machine. I've been nursing a sore Achilles for several months and have been doing my PT exercises fairly regularly on the cruise. It feels a lot better than it did in London. I exacerbated my injury when going for a piece of luggage on the carousel in Heathrow. I've been climbing the stairs our whole trip but using the elevators when going down more than a couple of flights.

 

Another pet peeve among my complaints is the volume on the televisions. I have to turn it down every time I turn on the set. It would be nice if they were set to remember the last volume level instead of coming out at a blasting volume.

 

 

 

 

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I won a notebook in the bean bag challenge by getting three out of four in the hole. I joined the Canadian couple for the morning trivia. It was a hard trivia. We had 12 out of 21. The winners had just 16. We should have had a couple more points if we had gone with other instincts. We disagree with one answer. The host had a number of things that Apollo was the god of but not the sun. 

 

Three people entered the egg drop competition. All of them got prizes. All three eggs survived the two-story drop from the Promenade Deck to the Plaza Deck in the atrium. 

 

As I was heading back to the cabin, I saw the throngs of people leaving the cooking demo and heading to the galley for a tour. I joined the line. It's always fun to see behind the scenes even after having done it before. There were a few people actually working in the galley. And here's a photo of Executive Chef Federico Fermiano 

 

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6 hours ago, geoherb said:

... The selection of books in the library is disappointing. There are a lot of empty shelves. ...

 

 

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This is indeed said to hear and see.  Unfortunately we have found this to be the case on many Princess ships lately.  Evidently the ships' libraries do not make any money for them.  We shall be on the Crown next month for a ten day cruise.  I shall have to bring along four or five paperbacks and leave them on the book swap shelf when finished.

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6 hours ago, MissP22 said:

Do you know if they were serving the lobster and/or beef Wellington in the Horizon court as well as the DR? 

 

They had oysters on the half shell and lobsters today at lunch in the Horizon Court. I went up around half an hour after they made the announcement. This was all the lobsters they had left. I did not get any. (I had been in line and could have, but decided to stick with my Meatless Monday for lunch at least.) I tried the vegetarian tacos at the poolside burger place. They weren't as good as I remember them from the Caribbean Princess. And then I had a slice of pizza. I also had some of the watermelon salad at the International Café. 

 

 

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